Eating Eggs Does Not Harm Arteries

COMMENT: I never thought that eggs did do any harm. I have yet to find any evidence that eggs are anything other than an entirely healthy food (so long as they haven't been tampered with — I'm thinking of 'omega-3 eggs'). You might like a couple of anecdotes on eggs.

Firstly, Dr Uffe Ravnskov, the founder of The International Network of Cholesterol Skeptics decided to test the theory that eggs raised blood cholesterol levels. So he ate 59 eggs in nine days. His cholesterol went down by 11%.

Vilhjalmur Stefansson tells a lovely story in his autobiography, Discovery, about Lord Strathcona, Canada's High Commissioner to England in the late 19th century. Lord Strathcona ate very little other than eggs — and lived well into his 94 year.

Stefansson writes:
"My first contacts with him were merely casual occasions for him to use his position as Canada's High Commissioner to expedite the work of the Canadian Arctic Expedition. It was not long, however, before there grew up between us the bond of a common interest — an interest in dietary matters. I told him what I had learned from the Eskimos, and he told me that years ago in Canada he had begun a regimen all his own by skipping lunch and ultimately breakfast too. Then he had begun to wonder why, since he liked some things better than others, he should bother to eat something different on Tuesday when he had liked what he had eaten on Monday better. This led to his questioning what he really did like and, when he got the answer, eating nothing else — eggs, milk, and butter. Although this combination would not have made up my favorite meal, much as I favor butter, the point was that Strathcona and I were in agree­ment on the feeling that the longer a man ate one complete food exclusively, the more likely he was to relish it.

"I had many opportunities to observe the High Commissioner while I was in London, for he frequently invited me to dinner at his home in Grosvenor Square, saying that So-and-So would be present and he thought I would like to meet him. Strathcona, a broad-shouldered man taller than six feet, would be seated at one end of the long table, Lady Strathcona at the other. As course after course was served to the rest of us, he would converse, drinking a sip or two of each wine as it was poured. Sometime during the middle of the dinner, his tray was brought: several medium-soft boiled eggs broken into a large bowl, with plenty of butter and with extra butter in a side dish, and, I believe, a quart of whole milk, or perhaps half-and-half. My impression is that they also brought him toast, but that he barely nibbled it, using it a bit as if it were a napkin."

So much for "5 portions of fruit and vegetables"!

Last updated 9 April 2005